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Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence

God likes it when you eat at Burger King. Or McDonald’s. Or Wendy’s. It warms His Holy Heart. But don’t you dare be so impiously impertinent as to go to any of these places and order a salad. No way! You’ve got to eat the flesh of a dead animal, because that’s what God expects of you.

Or so my wife’s former colleague claimed.

Back in the 1990s, Stacy—who was then my girlfriend—was working in a corporate office building in Santa Monica. One day during their lunch break, another employee offered Stacy some pepperoni pizza. Stacy declined. When the woman asked why, Stacy said, “I’m a vegetarian.”

This immediately irritated her coworker, who found Stacy’s disinterest in eating meat an affront—not just to her, but to something much bigger: God.

“Don’t you know that God made this planet for us?” she explained. “He made pigs and chickens and cows for us—to eat!”

According to this woman’s Evangelical worldview, Stacy’s vegetarianism was not simply rude but somewhat immoral, because it explicitly violated God’s cosmic plan: the Lord had created grass for us to lie on, trees to give us shade, water for us to drink and shower with, and many different animals for us to kill and feast upon. So why the hell was Stacy rejecting what God had made for her?

While Stacy’s pepperoni-popping colleague was just one random individual, her love of dead animal flesh comingled with a devout theism is actually quite common in the United States. Conservative Evangelical Christians are much more likely to be meat eaters than nonreligious Americans,¹ and many of them see vegetarianism as downright unethical because of what they read in the Bible. Remember, for example, the story of Cain and Abel? They were Adam and Eve’s sons. Cain tended to crops, while Abel was a shepherd. Both gave offerings to the Lord. Cain’s offering consisted of grains and vegetables, but Abel’s consisted of dead animals—and God liked Abel’s blood-soaked offerings much better. Given that Abel and his meat were favored by the Lord, Cain felt humiliated and jealous, and he ended up killing Abel. Thus, the first murder in history—at least according to the big book of Jewish and Christian mythology—paints the vegetarian in a negative light: not only is his offering considered paltry by God, but he turns out to be a violent killer. Sheesh.

Granted, there’s a lot more to interpret from this ancient Levantine tale—for example, it is a cautionary parable about what happens between siblings if their parent favors one over the other (not good). But for our purposes here, we can readily see the explicit significance of the biblical God preferring meat over maize—a divine preference that extends into the New Testament, where, in Romans 14, Saint Paul refers to those who only eat vegetables as “weak.” Thus, Stacy’s colleague’s antipathy toward vegetarianism was on solid biblical footing: both the Old Testament God and God’s number-one New Testament saint don’t like vegetarianism. And so neither did she.

The point of this anecdote involving Stacy’s eschewal of pepperoni and her coworker’s sacred scorn is not to broach the debate over whether or not we ought to eat animals.² Rather, it is about something bigger, deeper, and more perennial: the regularity and degree to which people think that God’s preferences are relevant in determining what is good or bad, wrong or right, moral or immoral. Or to put it more simply: the widespread notion that how we ethically ought to live is determined by God’s will and wishes.

What Does the Lord Require?

While my wife’s former colleague’s belief that God made the planet for us to exploit is certainly extreme, and not typical of most religious people—especially not the moderate and progressive ones—the fact remains that many social and political aspects of our world today are the way they are because lots of people think God wants them to be that way. Consider the scourge of anti-homosexuality. While fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, and fundamentalist Jews don’t agree on much, they do agree that homosexuality is immoral, basing their position on what they find in their respective holy scriptures. For example, in the Old Testament, we read passages like Leviticus 20:13, in which God commands that homosexuals be executed. In the New Testament, homosexuals are derogatorily described as “shameful,” “ungodly,” “sinful,” and “immoral” (1 Timothy 1), and elsewhere they are condemned as depraved, wicked, and “deserving of death” (Romans 1). In Islam, homosexuality is also condemned by God—or in Muslim parlance, Allah. According to the Quran (7:80), which blatantly plagiarizes the Old Testament, there was a city of Lut where the men preferred having sex with other men instead of with women, and as a result, Allah destroyed them all and obliterated the city; Allah clearly hates homosexuality so much that he’ll exterminate entire cities as a result. And Allah’s hatred of homosexuals is reiterated in the Hadith—the canonical sayings and doings of the all-perfect Prophet, Muhammad. According to one well-known Hadith (Abu Dawud 4462), the Prophet Muhammad declared that if two men have sex with each other, they shall both be murdered.

Thus, according to the holy scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the latter two being the two largest religions in the world—God considers homosexuality an abomination deserving of death. And so, according to those who look to this God or Allah for moral guidance, we ought not allow homosexuals to have any rights. They shouldn’t be allowed to get married, raise kids, or love who they want to love. And in more extreme religious contexts, they shouldn’t even be allowed to live. Such has been the situation throughout the reign of Christianity and Islam: homosexuals have been stigmatized, brutalized, and murdered, and they have had their human and civil rights curtailed or denied. And such is still the case in many nations to this day. Why? Because that is what the Lord requires.

Beyond homosexuality—or meat eating—there exist so many additional patterns of human behavior, cultural norms, and laws in our world today because of people trying to live in a way that they think is required by their God. Consider, for example, beating, hitting, or spanking your kids. Is it OK? Is it moral? Well, according to the biblical God, not only is it OK, it is actually necessary; the Lord decrees that it is a moral imperative to physically harm your child. “If you spare the rod,” we read in Proverbs 13 of the Bible, “you spoil the child.” Proverbs 23 makes it even more explicit: “Do not withhold correction from a child . . . you shall beat him with a rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” And Bible-believers take appropriate heed to such Lordly exhortations; a study from 2010 found that the more strongly Christian an American is, the more likely he or she is to consider spanking to be a good method of disciplining children; a full 85 percent of Christian fundamentalists believe in spanking their kids, compared to only 57 percent of nonreligious Americans.³ Another study, from 2012, compared secular parenting literature with Christian parenting literature; the former was critical of corporal punishment, while the latter was much more positive and supportive of it.⁴ And given that a solid body of research reveals the extent to which corporal punishment is damaging to children—psychologically, emotionally, and physically⁵—this divergence in secular versus religious views over corporal punishment is no mere matter of opinion; the effects are of explicit moral concern.

The list of things the Lord commands of us is long: what to eat or not eat, who to have sex with and not have sex with, how to dress, how to tend crops, how to trim our facial hair, how many witnesses to procure in order to prove a crime, what day to rest on, what gender ought to be in charge, and so on—and these commands are taken to be imperatively true and ethically binding by billions, thereby significantly shaping the personal morality of countless believers, who then go on to shape so many aspects of our world.

But here’s the rub: there is no evidence that this God even exists.⁶

No Proof

My wife’s former colleague insists that God wants us to eat meat—and yet she has no rigorous evidence that this God even exists. The Jewish, Christian, and Islamic fundamentalists who deny homosexuals the right to marry, adopt children, or to simply live—depending on what country we’re talking about—do so by insisting that it is God’s (or Allah’s) will that homosexuals be oppressed. And yet they offer no compelling evidence that this supreme deity is actually real. The parent who hits his children because he believes such abuse is what God wants offers no empirical evidence of this magical being’s verifiable reality.

And thus we arrive at the first, most basic critique of religiously ensconced theistic morality: it is based on faith in something that has never been positively proven to exist. The manifest failure of God-based morality is that its underlying basis, its central pillar, its muscle, its heart, its engine, its raison d’être—God—has never been shown to actually be real. The traditional theological claim that there is an almighty, all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural being who creates everything, gives commands, and performs miracles, has never been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Or even a pithy smidgeon of doubt.

Now, some may object that this traditional theological description of God is rudimentary or unsophisticated; not everyone who believes in God conceives of God as an almighty, all-knowing, fatherlike being. True enough. Most contemporary theologians will point out that there are much more intellectually sophisticated and dynamic theological explications or descriptions of God out there.

To which I reply: nonsense.

All such so-called “sophisticated” theology is nothing more than psychedelic poetry propped up by pretentious, pseudointellectual gobbledygook signifying absolutely nothing; it is heady, mind-bending verbiage cloaked in a costume of respectable erudition that doesn’t actually mean a thing—and certainly cannot be substantiated empirically, let alone logically defended. Consider, for example, prominent theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of God as “infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of being.”⁷ Hmm. And that means what, exactly? Nothing at all. According to theologian Hans Küng, God is defined as “the infinite in the finite, transcendence in immanence, the absolute in the relative.”⁸ Nice words. Poetic and ethereal—especially if you are high. But they don’t actually mean anything concrete. Deep Christian thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead—along with his process theology progeny—declare that God is “permanent . . . fluent . . . one . . . many . . . actual eminently . . . immanent . . .”⁹ Got that? You sure? Such “sophisticated” theology amounts to little more than what American philosopher Patrick Grim rightly criticizes as “refuge in vagueness,”¹⁰ or what the famous atheist writer Christopher Hitchens simply dismissed as “theo-babble”: religious or spiritual words strung together purportedly describing “God” that have no actual meaning or coherence when pondered for more than thirteen seconds.

And so, whether we are talking about the traditional notion of God (the all-powerful, all-knowing creator being who performs magical feats and reads our minds and watches our every move) or the indefinable, theologically “sophisticated” notion of God (e.g., “God is being-itself”¹¹—thanks, Professor Tillich!), both score a zero on the proof-o-meter. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams in 1820, “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial is to say that they are nothings . . .”¹²

Ever since the Polish Lithuanian nobleman Casimir Liszinksi wrote his treatise De non existentia Dei (On the Nonexistence of God) in the 1670s—for which he was brutally tortured and then burned to death—a vast array of books, essays, and pamphlets have been written effectively pointing out the glaring lack of evidence for the existence of God. I don’t plan to restate all their arguments here, but I’ll quickly convey the basic highlights.

Below are some of the most typical theistic claims put forth in attempting to prove God’s existence, with the standard skeptical rebuttals.

The Creation of the World

Theistic Claim: Just look at the world! Look at the universe! Look at aardvarks, birch trees, zinc, stalactites, onions, smallpox, and Jupiter! How did all these wondrous things get here if there is no God to create them?

Skeptical Response: This is no proof at all for the existence of God. It is simply known as the “argument from ignorance” or “appeal to ignorance,” which is a typical fallacy of informal logic that tries to establish a claim based on the fact that we actually don’t know enough about something, or don’t possess enough knowledge about something and—in our ignorance—are then mistakenly expected to accept the claim. But the claim has not been proven.

Let me give a quick example of the appeal to ignorance at work.

Suppose you and a friend decide to fly to Beijing. On the plane, your friend leans over and says to you, “The pilot’s name is Rootbeer.”

You are skeptical: “Rootbeer? Really? That can’t be right.”

And then your friend asks, “Well, do you know what the pilot’s name is?”

“No,” you admit.

“Aha, so then it must be Rootbeer!”

Pretty ridiculous, right? I mean, your friend hasn’t proven anything. Just because you don’t know the pilot’s name doesn’t mean that your friend does. And your admitted ignorance of what the pilot’s name is doesn’t mean that your friend’s unusual claim is then automatically correct. What you would need in order to believe that the pilot’s name is in fact Rootbeer is some compelling evidence to convince you. But lacking such evidence, your denial of “Rootbeer” as the pilot’s name is fully justified.

Now let’s try the same conversation, only this time about God.

You’re flying on a plane to Beijing, and your friend leans over and says to you: “Whoa, look at the sun beams coursing through those clouds out there. Check out that vast sky. It must have all been created by God.”

You are skeptical. “God? Really? A magic deity created all this? That can’t be right.”

And then your friend asks, “Well, then, do you know who or what created it all?”

“No,” you admit.

“Aha, so then it must be God!”

Your friend’s claim has not been proven. Not even close. He’s just basing an entire argument on ignorance. And as atheist writer B. C. Johnson states, “our ignorance of alternative explanations does not justify acceptance of the theistic explanation, because ignorance does not justify explanations—only knowledge does.”¹³

When it comes to knowledge of how the universe came to be, we are clueless. We remain agnostic. As leading American atheist Sam Harris has so soundly expressed, “no one knows how or why the universe came into being. It is not clear that we can even speak coherently about the creation of the universe, given that such an event can be conceived only with reference to time, and here we are talking about the birth of space-time itself. Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists.”¹⁴

But surely we know that everything has a cause, right? Religious philosophers, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and my recent Uber driver, have long reasoned that the universe couldn’t just exist on its own—something had to cause it to come into being. That cause, theists assert, is God. But by the very logic of this assertion—that everything has to have a cause—then God would also need to be caused. If the theists insist that God need not have a cause, then they are being blatantly illogical by their own standards.

To insist that God is somehow the great, single “uncaused cause” is, in the phrasing of American anthropologist David Eller, “word-magic at best and a malignant anti-answer at worst.”¹⁵ And besides, if God can in fact be miraculously uncaused, then so too could the universe. Or anything. Again, believing that the universe must have been caused by something else—something supernatural, no less—is not supported by any evidence. It is simply guesswork embedded in magical thinking, peppered with illogical fallacies, and wrapped in the tinfoil of faith. To account for the mystery of the existence of the universe by saying it is all the inexplicable work of an uncaused creator god gets us nowhere. Again from A. C. Grayling: “to explain something by invoking something itself unexplained is to provide no explanation at all.”¹⁶

Thus, the reasonable, rational position to take—when it comes to fathoming the incomprehensible existence and wonder of all of creation—is to remain in ignorance and simply admit that we don’t know its origin or cause, or if it even has an origin or cause in any imagined sense of the ways in which we employ such words, and humbly leave it at that. As Charles Darwin wrote concerning the ultimate origins of creation, “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”¹⁷

Complexity and Design

Theistic Claim: The natural world is full of profound complexity and deep design. Consider the intricate composition of the human eye or the complex components of a cell. Surely these things couldn’t just occur accidentally or by chance. Their intricacy and complexity obviously point to the conscious, deliberate handiwork of an intelligent designer. That intelligent designer is God.

Skeptical Response: First off, as Richard Dawkins explains in his book The Blind Watchmaker, and as Philip Ball further reveals in his book The Self-Made Tapestry, mind-blowing complexity and functional intricacy can and do arise without a designer, and the natural world abounds with patterns and designs that all have natural, undesigned, unwilled causes.¹⁸ Just look at snowflakes. Or evolution by natural selection, in which genetic information encoded in DNA changes and is modified by haphazard mutations.

Secondly, what we’ve got here is just another appeal to ignorance: because the world is full of complex organisms, it is claimed that this must be evidence for an intelligent creator god. But that’s a fallacious leap. It is more rational to just humbly scratch our heads at this mind-blowing complexity and accept it as mysterious and as yet hard to explain, rather than lazily accept “God” as the answer.

Third, to explain the apparent inexplicable origin of something deeply mysterious—like the complexity and intricacy of the natural world—by saying it was created by something even more inexplicable and ever more deeply mysterious (“God”) is an intellectual dodge. You’re just epistemologically punting: substituting one immediate mystery with an even more profound, more deeply unfathomable mystery. That’s not an explanation—quite the opposite. Consider, for instance, the profound complexities of the human brain and our very consciousness, which involve hundreds of millions of neurons and synapses working together in a nearly unfathomably intricate system. Science hasn’t worked out all the details of this natural, neurological wonder—but as Carl Sagan has pointed out, we don’t know any of the details of a magical invisible deity creating it all, either. To simply claim that “God made it” isn’t explaining anything at all.¹⁹

Fourth, theists insist that everything in the universe requires some sort of intelligent designer—except, of course, their God. But if you assert that everything in the universe requires a creator/designer—but that the creator/designer itself doesn’t require a creator/designer—then you’re just being boldly and blatantly illogical. For if God can exist without having been created or designed, then by the very same logic, so too could anything, including the universe. And also, if there was in fact an intelligent designer God, then who or what designed it? Something as amazing and complex as a deity that can create eyeballs and minds couldn’t just come out of nothing and nowhere! It must have been created by an even more intelligent designer! In the frank words of American philosopher Daniel Dennett, “If God created and designed all these wonderful things, who created God? Supergod? And who created Supergod? Superdupergod?”²⁰

As British poet and pioneering atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley reasoned back in 1811, the natural logic and consequence of this theological argument—that because the universe appears designed, it must be evidence of an intelligent creator god—leads to “an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing.” He continues, “The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that there are infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd.”²¹ And, I should add, lacking any empirical evidence.

Finally, even if one were to simply admit—yes—that the natural world is so truly full of such irreducible complexity and intricate design that, by all faculties of logic and reason, it must be evidence of some nonnatural, out-of-the-universe creator—what evidence is there that this creator is an intelligent god, per se? None. Endless other possibilities abound. As B. C. Johnson once quipped, one could just as easily speculate that the universe “was cooperatively constructed by several generations of billions of minor ghostly beings . . . all of them working together”—and thus—“the design argument, even if successful, does not come close to implying the existence of a God.”²² Or how about this one: all the wondrous design and complexity of the natural world is the result of a small, humble alien being from a mysterious other dimension—a being who is so humble that he didn’t want anyone to ever know that he was the superintelligent, superpowerful source of our entire universe, so he specifically planted the idea of a God in the early minds of those who would eventually create the world’s religions, just to throw humanity off his humble, alien scent.

Like I said, possibilities abound—both imaginable and unimaginable. And none of them should be embraced without any confirming evidence. Including belief in God.

Do I find it incredibly hard to fathom that the universe, with all its complexity, just “came to be” on its own, without any cause or source? You bet. But the only rational, reasonable conclusion to the intricacy of nature is agnosticism: we don’t know its cause or source, and maybe we never will. Deal with it. Accept it. Own it. Embrace it. And definitely don’t accept an irrational, unproven explanation as a suitable answer—especially if it involves the supernatural. As Albert Einstein wrote, in explication of his atheism, “we have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.”²³

Living on a Prayer—or Not

Theistic Claim: God exists because He answers prayers.

Skeptical Response: All stories of answered prayers are merely anecdotal. The actual answering of prayers has never been proven in any sort of controlled, unbiased setting or objective experimental design.²⁴

Oh, wait just a minute. That’s not quite true. There was that big Templeton study back in 2006.

Led by Dr. Herbert Benson and funded by the Templeton Foundation to the tune of $2.4 million, this was the most rigorous, empirically sound study of the possible positive effects of prayer ever conducted in the history of science. The study was double-blind and involved a control group and an experimental group—just the right conditions to objectively measure the relationship between an independent variable (in this case, being prayed for or not) and a dependent variable (improved health). Here’s what Dr. Benson’s team did: they randomly divided up over 1,800 coronary bypass heart surgery patients from six different hospitals into three groups: the first group had Christians praying for them—the Christians prayed that the selected heart patients would have “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications”—and the patients in this group were told that people might or might not be praying for them. The second group of heart patients was not prayed for, but they were also told that they might or might not have people praying for them. The third group was prayed for, and these patients were told that they were definitely being prayed for. The Christians that were doing all the praying were given the first name and last initial of the specific patients they were to pray for. The result: there was virtually no difference in the recovery trajectories of each group, with all three groups experiencing more or less the same rates and levels of complications. The only minor differences that did arise actually worked against the prayers; for example, 18 percent of the patients who had been prayed for suffered major complications such as strokes or heart attacks, compared to only 13 percent of the patients who did not receive any prayers.²⁵

There was also that Duke study back in 2003. In this three-year experiment, nearly 750 heart patients in nine different hospitals, all slated for coronary surgery, were prayed for by a variety of religious people, including Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews. The results of this double-blind experiment were similarly conclusive: there were no significant differences in the recoveries or health outcomes of those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.²⁶

The scientific study of the effectiveness of prayer—or rather, the lack of effectiveness—goes back at least 150 years, with the first known formal attempt to empirically discern prayer’s efficacy being carried out in 1872 by pioneering British statistician Francis Galton. He reasoned that since the British royal family received far more prayers on its behalf than everyone else—praying for the royal family was a structured part of Sunday services throughout Great Britain—then they should live longer and experience better health than everyone else. Galton statistically tested this hypothesis and (of course) found that the regular prayers of the mass of British people had no such discernible effect on the royal family—they did not, on average, live longer or enjoy better health than anyone else, given all relevant variables considered. Galton also conducted horticultural tests in which he prayed over randomly selected parcels of land; his prayers had no effect on which sections of land bore better, richer, stronger, or more abundant plant life. And thus, between Galton’s research in 1872 and Templeton’s in 2006, no compelling evidence has ever been brought forth empirically illustrating the power of prayer.²⁷

This doesn’t mean, of course, that people don’t experience wondrous, inexplicable things all the time, or that every now and then someone’s prayers appear to have been answered. Such things happen frequently: a wife is told that her dying husband has a zero chance of recovery. Prayers are prayed. And then—voilà—the husband suddenly recovers, astonishing the doctors who are left dumbstruck, unable to explain his recovery. It’s nothing short of a miracle. While these things do happen, what is far and away more common is that the husband dies—a heap of fervent prayers notwithstanding. And also note that for every person who miraculously recovers, there’s another perfectly healthy person who suddenly, for no apparent reason, drops dead of some minor illness, or strange disease, or undetected aneurism, or stroke, or infection. Such is the precarious randomness of the human body and its functioning—people sometimes recover when all odds are against them, but more often than not, they don’t.

Think about it: if praying worked, no prayed-for mothers would ever die of breast cancer; no prayed-for teenagers would ever die on the operating table; no prayed-for dogs or cats would ever fail to return home; hundreds of thousands of praying Tutsi families hiding throughout the woods, alleys, attics, and cellars of Rwanda in 1994 would not have been found and hacked to death by Hutu marauders; hundreds of thousands of trains packed with praying Jewish families on the way to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibór, and Treblinka in the 1940s would have never reached their destinations; and tens of millions of praying people would never die from starvation resulting from a lack of rain. Heck, three hundred million people died from smallpox in the twentieth century alone—clearly, all of their prayers, and their parents’ prayers, and their children’s prayers, and their spouses’ prayers, did not have the hoped-for healing effect.

In the face of prayer’s inefficacy, believers will always say: God may not answer your prayer in the way you want—but He has a plan for you nonetheless and knows better. Of course, they offer no tangible evidence for this assertion. But even if it were true—especially if it were true—then why bother praying? If you believe that God already has a plan for you and yours, then praying for any given outcome for you and yours makes no sense. It’s all so deeply irrational in a way that only religious faith can be: you pray to God to cure your child’s leukemia, and your child recovers, and that’s evidence that prayer works—or, more likely, you pray to God to cure your child’s leukemia, and your child dies, and that’s evidence that God answered your prayer but just in a different way than you wanted, because God has a plan and knows better.

Talk about classic “heads I win, tails you lose” balderdash that defies basic rational scrutiny.

And, well, that’s because praying is not rational. It is simply—and understandably—what most humans do when there’s nothing left for them to do in dire, scary, or painful situations. It is what theists do when they have little or no control over a situation that they’d like to change. It’s what religious men and women do when they need to comfort themselves during trying times. And if it does provide them all with even a modicum of comfort and hope during such times, so be it. Such self-consolation can be a good thing. But it doesn’t come close to proving the existence of God.

Finally, on this matter of prayer: even if it could actually be proven that prayers to God do in fact work—that an all-powerful deity heeds earnest mental petitions—then that raises the question: What sort of deity would this be, ethically speaking? One that helps suffering or scared humans only when and if they ask/plead/implore? Seems downright malevolent. As American philosopher Georges Rey commented, “the idea of an omni-god that would permit, for example, children to die slowly from leukemia is already pretty puzzling; but to permit this to happen unless someone prays to Him to prevent it—this verges on a certain sort of sadism and moral incoherence.”²⁸

Proving in the Wrong Direction

Theistic Claim: Well, you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist—so there!

Skeptical Response: The fact that I can’t prove that God doesn’t exist is not an argument that he does. With that kind of fallacious argumentation, just about anything and everything that anyone anywhere has ever claimed to be true could ostensibly be true. Check it out:

• “There are tiny, imperceptible leprechauns running around in space, singing Peruvian folk songs. You can’t prove that there aren’t!”

• “All plants were created by Plantomina, an all-powerful, supernatural witch who flies around the universe creating plants on various planets. You can’t prove that Plantomina isn’t real!”

• “Every time I play The White Album, a goat in Bolivia feels melancholy. You can’t prove that it doesn’t!”

And so on, ad infinitum.

It’s a wretched way to establish a claim as empirically true. In fact, it’s not establishing any truth at all—it’s just avoiding having to prove one’s assertion by turning the tables and making the skeptical doubter bear the burden of proof. But the skeptical doubter isn’t making any claims. She’s just doubting the supernatural claim—in this case, the religious claim that God exists. And any time someone makes such a claim, especially an amazing, highly miraculous claim like the existence of a magical deity—he or she bears the burden of proof; it is his or her job to prove it true, not the skeptic’s job to prove it false.

And furthermore, when the theist claims that the atheist can’t prove that God does not exist, that raises the question: Which God? Are you demanding that Zeus be proven not to exist? Thor? Ra? Hachiman? Amenhotep? Inti? The God of the Jews? The Heavenly Father of Mormonism? Allah, the god of Islam? And are these all distinct gods—each which must be individually disproven not to exist—or are they all the same god? But even if we stick with the, you know, most popular “God” that American Christians claim to believe in—no one can ever offer a clear, objective definition of this most generic of gods. Everyone has their own understanding of Him—some traditional, others personal, some metaphorical, and still others psychedelic. And then, just to shoot more distracting confetti into the court room, the theist will regularly claim that the God she believes in is incomprehensible, indefinable, ineffable, and unknowable! But to say that God is incomprehensible is to frankly acknowledge that any clear definition of God cannot be offered—for how can you define what cannot be comprehended or grasped?

When the atheist is asked to disprove the existence of God, she faces a never-ending shell game, where the target is ever shifting, the subject impossible to pin down, and the matter under question ultimately one big dynamic sleight of hand—or sleight of mind, in this case. But at least in a real shell game, the manipulator knows where the ball is hiding. When it comes to theism, even the religious believer in God is peddling something ultimately unknowable, inscrutable, ineffable, invisible, undetectable, indefinable, imperceptible, indiscernible—or more succinctly: not there.

Ye of Lots of Faith?

There are countless additional ways in which religious people try to prove the existence of God. None work. None hold up to any sort of evidentiary scrutiny. And that’s when they inevitably, and conveniently, turn to faith in defense of their claim that God exists. Thus, the final “argument” for belief in God is not based on any verifiable evidence or sound logic but rather faith. And as Mark Twain rightly quipped, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Or as Twain’s contemporary and fellow wit Ambrose Bierce put it, faith is “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”²⁹ Or as the much less humorous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche remarked, faith is nothing more than “the will to avoid knowing what is true.”³⁰

While faith may certainly be comforting, and it may be inspiring, and it clearly holds a place of value in most people’s hearts as they navigate the challenges of life, it is, nonetheless, an inherently poor way to establish the truth of anything. For, as American philosopher George Smith asserts, the essence of faith is “to consider an idea true even though it cannot meet the test of truth . . . faith is required only for those beliefs that cannot be defended.”³¹

Even Paul, the true founder of Christianity, honestly articulated the meaning of faith nearly two thousand years ago, which he defines in Hebrews 11 of the New Testament as confidence in what is hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. That is, faith is believing in what one wishes and hopes to be true (not what is true) and being convinced of things even without evidence of their empirical reality. And this is exactly what the theist does: hangs the entire corpus of her morality upon faith in something that doesn’t even exist.

And this will not do.

Morality and ethics are far too important to be based on some fantastical deity that can’t even be proven to exist. Morality and ethics are far too immediate and imperative to hinge upon mere wishes, hopes, and illusions. Morality and ethics—the underlying bases for how we treat one another and how we seek to structure society—cannot stand if they are based on the ephemeral, inscrutable claims of religious theism.³²

The fact that God has never been clearly defined or proven to exist is enough of a reason to dismiss—or at least be highly dubious of—any ethical system based on theism. As American philosopher Michael Martin has argued, “unless the concept of God is shown to be coherent, theism cannot possibly be thought to be an ontological foundation of morality.”³³ And yet, as we know, most people do believe that God exists—regardless of the glaring lack of evidence. And many of these theists base their morals on their faith in God, which spurs their love of pepperoni and dismissal of vegetarianism, bolsters their antipathy toward homosexuals and their opposition to gay marriage, and helps them justify the hitting of their children.

But wait—that’s not quite fair.

Not all theists share these views or predilections. Many people who believe in God support vegetarianism, are in favor of gay marriage, and oppose corporal punishment. The fact of the matter is that God-believers hold many different views, harboring a wide diversity of values on a variety of matters of ethical importance. No doubt. But while this impressive diversity of viewpoints among theists is perhaps something to be welcomed and celebrated, it is—at root—yet another significant reason as to why morality based on belief and faith in God is so problematic as to be manifestly untenable.